PoMoSco Day 17

17Apr

I warned you this prompt was a little strange. I had to give up understanding the instructions and just follow them: You’ll need your source text and a “seed” phrase of at least 20 characters, which can be related or not to your source. If your source text is on baseball, you might choose “Take me out to the ballgame”. If your source text is the Beatles, you might choose, “I Want to Hold Your Hand”.

Visit the Diastic Poem Generator. Enter your seed phrase and source text in the corresponding boxes, then click “Generate.” The program will create a “spell-through” of your text. Using the “take me out to the ballgame” example, the program will search through your text for the first word that has T in the first position (it might be a word like “the,” “travel,” or “true”) and add it to your word list. Next, it searches for a word that has “a” in the second position (e.g. “cap,” “batboy,” “game”), and so on, until it reaches the end of your seed text.

Add the results to your word bank, and keep clicking “Generate” to add additional iterations. For a more experimental text, keep the resulting text intact. Otherwise, remove text to create your poem — but try to keep the words in order. You’ll read my process at the poem: landscape world never lonely